You’re Dangerous

Briar

My eyes felt scratchy and raw when I woke the next morning. When I first arrived, I had gotten so used to days upon days of crying that I hardly noticed the feel of it anymore. This felt miserable, and I still felt emotionally exhausted. But memories of last night and how beautiful it had been had me eager to see how this morning would be.

I rolled over to an empty bed and frowned at the piece of paper that was propped up with my name on it. The last letter from Lucas had broken my heart, so I wasn’t sure if I wanted to read this one.

I studied the offensive paper for longer than was necessary before grabbing it, and rolled my eyes when I read the few words there.

I pulled on my clothes from last night then hurried to his bathroom for morning necessities, stopping at his shower to study it again on my way back to the bedroom.

No, it was definitely too complicated. There weren’t any knobs, levers, or handles. There was a screen on the wall I couldn’t get to turn on.

Once I was back in the room, I made the bed and took my note before heading upstairs so I could rinse off my body and change. While I waited for the water to warm, I went into the closet, pulled open the drawer that held the skimpy lingerie I still refused to wear, and dropped my morning note on top of the letter from last night.

I had decided the day before that if anything ever happened and this life was torn from me, I wanted to have something to know that it had been real.

That he had been real.

I was pulling on a pair of shorts not long after my shower when I heard Lucas’s heavy steps in the bathroom, and I bit back a smile when I glanced at him over my shoulder.

His arms were folded over his chest and his mouth was curled up on one side in a smirk that made my heart beat harder. “Morning.”

“Morning,” I echoed when I turned and walked toward him, and let my smile broaden when he pulled me in for a soft, teasing kiss that made my knees weak.

“Hungry?”

“Mmm-hmm,” I hummed against his lips. “What about work?”

He leaned back only far enough for those dark, dark eyes to search my face then said simply, “It can wait another day.” He cradled my head in one of his large hands, securing his fingers in my hair as he did, and tipped my head back to brush a feather-soft kiss across my lips. “Some things are more important,” he whispered, pulling me out of the closet. “Come on, breakfast is out back.”

With the havoc he’d just inflicted on my heart and my body, I wanted to forget about the food . . . but I let him lead me through the house to the doors that opened up to the backyard and sent him an excited smile when he waited for me to go ahead of him.

I’d looked down on this yard from the top floor numerous times, but looking down didn’t compare to this.

My breath rushed from me when we walked straight into a mini paradise, complete with palm trees, lush greenery, and a multitude of gorgeous flowers. A large pool was straight ahead with lounge chairs positioned on one side and an oversized cabana on the other. Before that, couches and tables with plush chairs littered an equally large patio, all covered by an extended wooden roof.

“Lucas,” I said on a breath, “this is beautiful.”

He wrapped his arms around my waist and pressed me to his chest. “I’m glad you like it. Maybe now someone will actually use it.”

“I can come out here?” I asked, surprise lacing my words.

His laugh was silent, but his chest moved with the force of it. “Yes, Briar, you can come out here. You can go anywhere you want.”

“You’ll never be able to get me in from the backyard,” I said excitedly, and he barked out a laugh.

“Come on, let’s feed you.”

We’d spent hours after breakfast talking about nothing and everything while lying on the king-sized lounger in the cabana. I was pressed close to Lucas’s chest as I took my time studying his arms and his face for the first time, my lips twitching into little smiles every time he’d hum in appreciation when my fingers would trail over his tanned skin.

I paused over one of the many scars on the arm I was focused on and chewed on my bottom lip for a second before whispering his name.

One of his dark eyebrows lifted before his eyes slowly opened.

I started to speak but stopped before I could ask my question.

“Whatever it is, ask.”

I searched his eyes for a few seconds, letting my gaze trail to where my fingers were drifting over his forearm. “I thought I knew you,” I began, my voice soft and unsure. “I thought I had you so figured out . . . but your arms make me wonder if there’s a part of you I don’t know at all.”

If I hadn’t been pressed so close to him, I wouldn’t have noticed how still he had become at my comment, because his face and his eyes gave nothing away. But I knew in the way he’d tensed I was right, and there was another layer to my devil I had yet to meet.

And as I lay there waiting for him to respond, I wondered if I wanted to meet him at all.

His brown eyes danced and his chest jerked from the force of his unexpected laugh. “My arms? What exactly are my arms telling you, Blackbird?”

I held his stare as I continued my slow dance up and down his arm. “You live in a multimillion-dollar home and have a driver. You wear suits ninety percent of the time and buy me everything, even if I don’t ask for or want it. You aren’t even thirty and you own an energy company—”

“I’m not the only owner.”

“You own a fifth of it, but it’s an equal share,” I amended. “You live in a world where men buy multiple women who are stolen from their lives, and where rape is a form of teaching those women a lesson. But somehow you’ve all twisted your minds to believe that raping them is still better than what they had before.”

Lucas’s eyes had gradually hardened with each point I brought up, and when he spoke, his voice was tight. “What’s your point, and what do my arms have to do with this?”

Without looking, I moved my hand down to where one of his tattoos began, the design wrapping around the inside of his left forearm. “These don’t fit.”

His eyebrows ticked up. “You don’t like my tattoos?”

“I didn’t say that. I said they don’t fit with the guy I just described. Especially not yours.” Before he could respond, I let my fingers slide up, tracing a long scar. “And neither do these. People have scars, Lucas, but you have so many,” I whispered as I moved to another, and then another. I studied the scar I was touching high up on his arm, and asked, “What happened to you?”

“That one was a bullet.”

My head snapped up at his reply. I hadn’t expected him to answer me, and I would’ve never expected that response. “What?”

But no matter how much I silently begged him to repeat himself, hoping that maybe I’d heard him wrong, he just stared at me as a minute passed by.

“Why were you shot?”

Instead of answering, he turned the conversation around to me. “Why do you stop singing when I walk into the room?”

As it had so often with Kyle, my body tensed. And just as I’d known I’d had Lucas not two minutes before, he now knew he had me.

He didn’t wait long for a response, and from the look he was giving me, he hadn’t expected one. He curled his large hand around my neck and traced feather-soft circles against my throat with his thumb as he spoke. “You don’t need me to tell you that your voice is beautiful; you already know it is. But you stop when you know I can hear you, and you sing when you’re scared . . . like it’s an involuntary reaction you can’t stop even though I could tell in those first days that you’d wanted to.” Another sweep of his thumb across my throat had my fear receding and my breaths growing heavy. “Now tell me, Briar, why would someone with a voice like yours be so afraid of it?”

Again, my body stilled, but it no longer had anything to do with the suspicion that crept through my body whenever anyone mentioned my voice . . .

Kyle had asked me countless times what I’d had to be afraid of when it came to singing, implying that I was good enough to do anything I wanted with my voice. But he’d never once in the years we’d been together noticed that I sang when scared, just as he’d never noticed I was afraid of my own voice.

But the man holding me . . . he missed nothing.

“There are parts of my life that you don’t know,” Lucas continued, “but there are parts of yours I haven’t begun to understand.”

I shook my head slowly, subtly. “You understand more than he ever did.” I didn’t have to say Kyle’s name. Lucas knew who I was talking about. “I used to love singing.”

When I didn’t offer anything else, he asked, “Not anymore?”

“I want to. I’m trying to—I’ve been trying to. I’ve sung a lot more for the fun of it in this last year than I had in the five years before. But most of the time I feel like I don’t know how to just sing.”

His dark eyes searched mine for a few seconds before he nodded. “The night I was shot . . . a lot of people died and a lot of people lived. I’m just lucky that when it all ended, I was one of the latter.”

I thought over his vague response as confusion flooded me. “Were you in the military?”

He laughed softly, but something in the tone changed at the end. The sound made me feel cold even though it was warm and humid outside. “No to the military. You see who I am now, Briar? Who I am here with you?”

I hesitated for only a second before nodding.

“You saw who I was when you came here?”

Another nod.

“I wasn’t born into this. I had to fight to get into this. I had a rough life before I met William. The night I was shot was a live-or-die shootout within my family.” When I looked up at him in horror, he dipped his head closer. “Not what you expected from your devil? It was a necessity for William to take me on.”

This man wasn’t just cloaked in darkness; he was darkness. I had feared him and that darkness, but I had never thought of him as dangerous. Panic slithered through me at his menacing tone, but I didn’t shy away. Because even though the fear was there, I couldn’t connect it to the man in front of me.

“You . . . did you kill someone?”

He released me and rolled so he was on his back and staring at the top of the canopy, but not before I saw his eyes. “I’ve killed a lot of people.”

I knew from his steady words he wasn’t lying, but I also knew in the heaviness of his tone and the pain that flashed through his eyes he hated himself for what he’d done.

And it was then that I knew I had been right: I didn’t know this man at all. Because that look and that weight pressing on him wasn’t the devil who’d bought me, or the Lucas who’d broken rules for me. He was someone else entirely.

I sat up so I was sitting cross-legged on the bed and forced myself to remain calm when I asked, “Why?”

As if he didn’t realize he was doing it, his right hand passed across his left forearm a few times, just over the large, swirling tattoo. “It’s easier to explain why I’ve killed people than it is to explain why I tried to break you, but that doesn’t mean I can explain it to you.”

“Lucas, I’ve given my body and heart to you, and you just told me you’ve killed people—including members of your family.” I took a steadying breath when my voice took on a frantic edge and swallowed roughly before continuing. “You need to give me something.”

He reached out for me, but he paused when I flinched. “I won’t ever hurt you again.” His hand stayed suspended between us for long, torturous moments before it fell to his stomach, and he looked at the canopy again. “Sometimes you don’t have a choice, Briar,” he said in a soft, haunted voice. “As for the family . . . like I said, it was a live-or-die situation, and my brother technically shot first.”

I stared down at him as shock and confusion flooded and overwhelmed me. I didn’t understand how he could talk about these things so calmly. I didn’t understand how they could be true at all and wanted them not to be.

“How could a family enter into a shootout in the first place?”

“Because they wanted to hurt something I’d vowed to protect.” Lucas’s face had slipped into an emotionless mask, and his voice was a deadly calm when he responded, letting me know he was done talking about what had happened that night.

I’d wondered so many times how the women who were forced into this world would ever want to stay, especially when they would never have the kind of relationship that Lucas and I had. After meeting William’s women and hearing their stories from their previous lives . . . in a way, I could understand. But only to an extent.

Even more, I’d wondered how these men had ever entered this world, and how their minds had been warped and twisted into thinking this life was okay. I’d been sure they’d all come from money—given what I’d seen of Lucas and William, and knowing that they paid for all the women—and had disturbing fetishes. But after being given the smallest glimpse into Lucas’s past, I couldn’t help but wonder how someone like him had stumbled into this life, and why his past had been essential for it.

“So, you’re dangerous,” I mumbled softly.

“Not to you.”

“In general.” I let my eyes gloss over the scars that littered his arms and wondered what all the other ones were from. “Why was that a necessity for William? What in this life would require you to be that way? The energy industry can’t be so . . .” My words died when he laughed darkly.

“Not all of the men in this world work in energy. There are some in oil, gas . . .” He eyed me and dropped his voice. “The government, the police . . . which is why we’re able to live the way we do. We control Houston and everything that happens in the surrounding cities. Police, weapons, drug—”

“Sex trafficking,” I added bitterly.

Lucas made a face like he was going to deny it. “Human trafficking.”

“There isn’t a difference—”

“There is,” he argued. “It’s different than the sex trafficking that you hear about in the news. If you hadn’t been bought at the auction, you would have found yourself in a situation like what you see in the news. The sellers would have just sold you off to a brothel, or taken you overseas and sold you to a whore house where they keep their women of all ages pumped full of drugs so they can’t try to run.”

My stomach churned. “Oh God.”

Lucas nodded. “But I guess, in a way, we control that too. We don’t outright say anything to, or against, the sellers, and they don’t expose our world. But since we have law enforcement in our world and in our pockets, every couple of years or so we tip detectives off when we know they have a shipment of children coming in or going out of the Gulf, and law enforcement conveniently looks the other way when we bring in weapons. And the cocaine that runs along the Gulf and up through Houston? It doesn’t get bagged or pass hands until it goes through William and then me, and it comes from an Irish-American mob.”

“Comes from a what?” I choked out, my words nearly silent from the shock of his admission.

His eyes searched mine for a minute before he spoke again, his tone soft, yet urgent. “So now you see, my work is so much more than just going and sitting in an office, and I am surrounded by the worst kind of people. That is why William was so interested in my past.”

My head shook absentmindedly as I tried to comprehend all that he had told me.

Knowing the man Lucas was behind the darkness, I couldn’t grasp why he had ever fought to get into this life at all.

“I’d been wondering what had happened in your life to make you into the devil I saw so often at the beginning,” I began, my voice soft . . . almost hesitant. “But now I wonder how you were able to remain you, instead of letting the devil completely consume you.”

“Don’t ever make the mistake of thinking that that part of me isn’t there.”

“I couldn’t,” I said honestly and huffed a small laugh. “He’s always there . . . I see you fighting him all the time. Now, more than I have in a long time.”

He held my stare, and his dark eyes burned with something I couldn’t define. “You’re afraid of me.”

I wished in that moment for my room so I could have something to hide behind, at least for a minute, because I knew I couldn’t hide any of the emotions coursing through me, and I couldn’t lie to him. “Yes,” I whispered and hated that he seemed to not only expect my answer but accept it. Reaching out, I traced around the outer edge of his eye, thankful I wasn’t shaking. “I’m afraid of the eyes I’m looking into right now. I’ve been afraid of them for a long time. I’m afraid of what I know about you now, but I wonder if I haven’t always known. If you haven’t hinted at it before . . .”

“Briar—”

“But the things you see in your mind that force me to see these eyes? They’ve been there this whole time. They were there when I fell in love with you, and I knew when I fell that they would always be there.” I watched as he fought with whatever haunted him and lowered myself back onto the bed and curled against his side. “The darkest part of your soul can terrify me, but it won’t cause me to leave.”

He gripped my hand in his, and mumbled, “Sometimes I wish it would.” Before I could react or respond, he continued. “If you think I’m dangerous, maybe you understand what my life is like, and maybe you can grasp the danger in throwing out the rules for you. Eventually someone other than William will see what you mean to me. And with who we are and what we do, we all have so many enemies who’ve been waiting for a chance to get back at us—to hurt us.” He raised our joined hands to kiss my wrist and let his lips linger on the skin there. “We don’t have weaknesses, Briar, but you are mine. They’ve been waiting for you.”